When I first came to the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, I thought I couldn’t be more prepared. To get my German qualification degree for university, I attended a school focused on nutritional science, so I know all about how food affects the body, how the wrong food will impact certain aspects of people’s health and, of course, what happens to your body and your mind when you just don’t get enough food.

In Germany we have many restrictions and laws for the food industry and the import of goods. Buying unhealthy products—although frowned upon— is definitely possible, but also really obvious. In Germany, it’s hard to find an excuse for unhealthy dietary habits. But still, no one says there is not a hunger issue in Germany. I know about some organizations like the “Tafel,” which is basically the German version of a food bank. They get donations and collect leftovers from bakeries and butcheries and sometimes from retail stores. People get a specific number of coins to spend on products at the “Tafel,” but to be honest, there isn’t nearly enough for everyone. Big supermarkets that throw away an exorbitant amount of food on a daily basis aren’t even allowed to give that excess food to the organization.

Friends told me about the high poverty rates in the American South and especially in Arkansas, but at a certain point, I just began to doubt everything they were saying. When I showed up to begin my 3-month volunteer commitment on Monday, the first thing I realized was how unprepared I actually was. At 12:30pm I was talking to a coworker about some information they had given me in the morning. I heard myself saying: “This is so much worse than I expected!”

The numbers I found were shocking. There are 560,000 people in Arkansas that are food insecure. This means they can’t say for a fact that they’ll be able to provide food for themselves or their families on a daily basis. That’s 19% of Arkansas’s population. Just as shocking was the insight of 200,000 children at risk of hunger. This is happening in a state with one of the longest harvest seasons, in a country that has more than enough resources to feed its people. How is it possible, that 28% of all children in Arkansas live in poverty?[i]

When I first heard the word food desert, I couldn’t even imagine what it meant. I learned that there are places in rural areas so isolated that people have to drive twenty miles to get to the nearest supermarket or any source of food that is also healthy. Twenty miles is a 30- to 45-minute drive if they have a car or enough money for food.

I can honestly say, this first day at the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance has been eye opening and shocking, but it made me very excited at the same time. Excited – because I get to work here and have the chance to actually make a difference.

[i] http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/data/state-data-repository/cits/2015/2015-arkansas-children-in-the-states.pdf